From within the ranks of the Russian dissidents, Andrei Sakharov sent an open letter to the U.S. Congress, dated September 14, 1973, in which he urged passage of the amendment: “I am appealing to the Congress of the United States to give its support to the Jackson Amendment, which represents in my view and in the view of its sponsors an attempt to protect the right of emigration of citizens in countries that are entering into new and friendlier relations with the United States… Adoption of the amendment… cannot be a threat to Soviet-American relations. Even less is it likely to imperil international détente.”
Two months later there was an opposing response from the Soviet dissident historian Roy Medvedev: “… it would be unrealistic to presume that under pressure from the American Congress the Soviet government will adopt a special law permitting unrestricted emigration from the USSR for all who so desire. And if the American Congress should adopt the Jackson Amendment… on this account, and should refuse most-favored-nation status to the Soviet Union, this would probably not improve but only worsen prospects for resolution of the emigration problem in the near future. Also, Soviet-American relations would deteriorate.”
Between those two letters came the sudden Yom Kippur War, which began on October 6, 1973, with a coordinated surprise attack by Egypt and Syria against Israel. In the apartment on Gorky Street, the Slepak family sat listening to Soviet radio broadcasts about Israeli provocations along the Suez Canal and the victorious attacks of the Egyptians and Syrians. Then: a day or so of silence, followed by announcements about the insidious Israelis being armed by Western imperialist powers, gaining the rear of the Egyptian Army, beginning to annihilate the civilian population. Over the shortwave radio given to the Slepaks by an overseas visitor came news of the surrounded Egyptian Third Army, of Israeli troops on the other side of the Suez Canal and within thirty miles of Cairo, of the Syrian withdrawal, of the maneuverings of diplomats.
In the United States the debate over the Jackson-Vanik Amendment grew hotter. The Israelis needed the support of the Nixon administration in the war; Nixon, willing to send arms, wondered if American Jews, desirous of his advocacy of Israel, might dampen their enthusiasm for the amendment. Kissinger, who was now secretary of state, reminded American Jews that an end to the war in the Middle East required the support of the Soviets, who would balk in view of the American Jewish support of the amendment. Caught in a classic conflict between the White House and Congress, American Jewry twisted and turned uncomfortably.
The diploma tax was quietly suspended-not rescinded-in March 1974. In June, Premier Brezhnev visited the United States, presented statistics on the numbers of Jews who had emigrated from the Soviet Union, gave his word that more would be leaving in the future, and lobbied for unconditional trade credits. Later that same month, President Nixon, engulfed and crippled by the Watergate scandal, traveled to Moscow. To avoid the possibility of demonstrations or other embarrassing public disturbances during his stay, the KGB, in advance of his arrival, arrested and imprisoned dozens of dissidents in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and elsewhere-Volodya among them. Along with others, he was stripped and searched and taken to the town of Serpukhov, some sixty miles from Moscow, where he was put into a cell for fifteen days.
Two months later Nixon resigned the presidency, and Gerald Ford became president. On December 20 Congress passed the Trade Reform Act and the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. The Slepak family chronicles record, in Volodya’s words, that “immediately afterward, Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko issued a statement in the usual Soviet propagandistic tone: ‘We will never let anyone dictate to us.’ To save face,” Volodya maintains, “they stopped the emigration.”
But it was not the Jackson-Vanik Amendment that really angered the Kremlin and brought defeat to Soviet Jews and Americans in this phase of the visa war-the Soviets might have been able to meet its stipulations and emigration provisos-but an amendment to the Import-Export Bank bill, proposed by Senator Adlai Stevenson III. The amendment limited credits to the USSR to three hundred million dollars a year for four years-credits the Kremlin desperately needed at the time to finance, at low interest rates, its purchases of American technology. That limitation, which insulted and infuriated the Kremlin, put an end to the trade debate, and on January 10, 1975, the Soviets abruptly canceled the agreement their trade minister had signed in October 1972 with President Nixon.
Inside the Soviet Union, KGB repression of dissidents intensified. Many young men who applied for exit visas were conscripted into the armed forces. There was an increase in trials of Jewish dissidents and a decrease in emigration: from 20,628 in 1974 to 13,221 in 1975. In Volodya’s words, the Kremlin nullified its trade agreement with the United States because “the Soviets couldn’t say that three hundred million dollars was too little in exchange for the Jews.”
Still, the Kremlin needed most-favored-nation status. Also, Brezhnev wanted an arms agreement and probably felt it necessary to respond to Western criticism of his embarrassing 1976 Stalinesque crackdown against human rights activists. To the surprise of many, in that same year, 1976, the number of Jews granted permission to emigrate suddenly rose. And kept rising every year to 1979, when 51,320 left.
Volodya and Masha were not among them. Their visa war continued. But after the Jackson-Vanik Amendment it was a very different kind of war, because America was now involved.
Solomon Slepak, an old man with a bad heart and recent prostate surgery, had a weapon of his own in the visa war: silence.
His first wife, Volodya’s mother, had died after a long battle with cancer. Sanya, the older of Volodya’s two sons, adds to the family chronicles an account of how as a child he would come into the room of his grandparents, where his grandmother would be lying behind a screen, and hear her scream at him to leave because she could not bear visitors. Sometimes his grandfather would be seated at a table, reading a newspaper, the entire paper held high and open in front of him, concealing his face. Sanya remembers that his grandfather taught him to read by spreading the newspaper on the table and showing him how to put letters together to make words. Once, in another world and time, Solomon Slepak, recently arrived in New York, had learned to read English from newspapers spread on the floor, taught by his sister’s children. Often Sanya and his grandfather would go for a walk and Sanya would ask for a chocolate and they would wait on a line for an hour or longer at the candy store, and as they waited, his grandfather would tell him tales about legendary fighters for the cause of the Revolution, about stalwart workers, about young boys and their heroic deeds.
When his wife died, the Old Bolshevik married again and now lived in a small house with his second wife. From time to time he and Volodya and Masha continued to call one another and meet-until the complete separation that followed when they told him of their plans to emigrate to Israel. From then on, the Old Bolshevik would have nothing to do with his son and daughter-in-law. They would hear about him on occasion through Volodya’s cousin Anatoly.
Masha’s mother once remonstrated with Solomon Slepak. “Grandchildren shouldn’t suffer because a father and a son have difficulties between them. The grandchildren have only one grandfather. How can you bear to deprive them of their grandfather?”
And so Sanya-at times alone, at times with his little brother, Leonid-traveled by Metro and tram three or four times a year to Solomon’s house. The Old Bolshevik lived on Mashkova Street, a narrow side road in the center of old Moscow. The one-story house, inside a courtyard, was made of wood, a ramshackle affair, leaning walls, creaking floors, something out of Gogol. It had a small backyard, with flowers and bushes. A big German shepherd dog raced about, barking furiously. Redolent of poverty, the house looked shrunken and withdrawn from the outside world, forgotten by history, like the man who lived inside.